said you'd give me light
by Leli1013
Summary: All she wants to do is to stay, to scoot over a few inches and bury herself into May's side because she smells nice and feels like home in a way that nothing and no one has before. (Part 3 of 'when you build your house call me home' series)


A/N: As always, this is unbeta'd, so please be kind if you review. Title is taken from the song "Sara" by Fleetwood Mac

Skye can't quite understand how a chunk of her hair ended up in the massive knot at the back of her head when all she has done all day is sit in Coulson's office and work on her computer. She suspects it must have happened during either lunch or dinner, although, even then, all she did was get up and walk to the kitchen and eat. Either way, she is desperate to get this knot sorted out so she can move on with her life. Usually, this would be a problem she would handle on her own but, thanks to Hunter and a slippery ramp, she now has a broken right wrist and no way to properly brush her own hair.

Earlier she set out on a small quest to find someone to brush her hair and, despite being in a fairly well populated secret base, she can't find anyone who will. Coulson and May are stuck in a late conference call, Fitz-Simmons are running some kind of experiment in the lab, Bobbi is locked away with Hunter, and Mac just about ran away when she approached him; so, here she is, wandering around the Playground with messy hair and a broken wrist, pouting at her Hello Kitty paddle brush like she could guilt it into magically brushing her hair on its own.

After filching a cookie from the kitchen she makes her way back to the dormitory wing, stands in the long hallway, and contemplates whether she should roam the base like some bedraggled ghost until someone can help her or just go back to her room and accept her once beautiful hair's fate.

"Skye?"

She turns around and is delighted to see May standing by her own bedroom door. The older woman is looking at her with curious and slightly worried eyes and Skye thinks she might actually cry.

She also wonders if she might be getting her period soon because it's only just now hitting her how overdramatic she is (probably) being over her the state of her hair.

"May! I thought Coulson said you guys were going to be stuck on that call until late."

"We finished early," May says, looking her over intently. "Are you okay? You look a little unkempt."

"It hurts to brush my hair. Can you brush it for me? I don't want to go to bed with this mess and wake up with a bird's nest that I'll have to chop off," Skye asks, her eyes wide, begging, and pitiful.

May rolls her eyes. "Yes, I'll help you brush your hair," she answers, pulling her protégé into her room. "And stop giving me those dumb googly eyes; you're just like Phil."

Skye never thought she'd ever see May's room and, honestly, never gave it much thought. Before she became her S.O., back when she thought the senior agent was an emotionless robot, Skye had assumed that May's room would be Spartan, bare save for the necessities and maybe some weapons. Now, she walks into the woman's room and isn't totally surprised to find that it smells faintly of lavender and jasmine. When the lights come on she uses her recently acquired skills to quickly take in as much of the space as she can. The bedsheets are the standard issue grey they were given when they first arrived at the Playground, but there is a small, ratty, stuffed panda cheerfully sitting on top of the pillows and she can see the Captain America throw that sometimes lays across the armchair in Coulson's office neatly folded at the foot of the bed. There is a picture of an old Chinese woman who she assumes is May's mother sitting lonely on her nightstand; her dresser, on the other hand, is populated by a row of jade elephants and a familiar shiny white model car with a yellow number five painted in a red circle.

May sits cross-legged at the center of bed, silently pats the space in front of her, and immediately starts to work the messy knots out of the back of Skye's head the moment she takes her seat in front of her. She tries to be gentle, even on the biggest and messiest knot at the nape of her neck, and softly strokes each section after it has been detangled. Skye revels in the happy calm sensation each stroke elicits, feeling it flow from her roots to the tips of her toes and back again. No one has brushed her hair in years, not since she was seven and the nuns at St. Anne's told her that she was big enough to do it herself; but she has missed this, ached for it in a subtle way that almost catches her by surprise.

It doesn't take long for May to detangle her hair but she continues to brush it slowly and carefully, alternating between using her fingers and the brush, and Skye decides she wants to make this last for as long as she can. She does her best to stay quiet and ignore her impulse to interrogate May about all of her various knickknacks because May likes quiet and Skye figures that if she stays quiet then she will be able to stay.

"You're going to need a trim soon. Remind me next week so we can go into town and get that done," May tells her, putting the brush down long enough to reach across the bed to retrieve something from her nightstand. She briefly pauses when all she hears in response is Skye's hushed "Okay" before going back to her task. "You're awfully quiet. Here I thought I was going to get a hundred questions about Bo."

"Who's Bo?"

May points to the stuffed panda now sitting comfortably in a nearby chair.

"Oh," Skye says, briefly at a loss for words. May never invites personal questions and normally she would jump at the opportunity to ask away, but she really doesn't want her to stop being so close to her and having her play with her hair.

"My grandmother gave her to me when I was very small. She's been with me almost my whole life."

Skye can feel her starting to separate her hair into sections for braiding and decides to take the chance. "Is she just for decoration or do you sleep with her?"

"Once in a while I sleep with her, when I need her; but usually she stays in that chair when I go to bed."

"I never imagined that you, of all people, still snuggled with a stuffed animal."

May shrugs. "She's comforting. Don't you have a stuffed animal you snuggle with?"

One of her nicest foster dads had won John the Walrus for her at a carnival when she was four, years later one of her ex-boyfriends threw him out the window while they were driving down the highway.

"Not anymore." She feels May lightly stroke her shoulder and then go back to braiding her hair. She lets out an almost happy sigh before gesturing towards the model car on the dresser. "Actually, I was wondering about that. I thought Coulson was the only one with those kinds of toys."

"That is _not_ a toy," May says firmly. "That is a die-cast model of Speed Racer's Mach 5 and it is not to be played with."

Skye bites her smile. "Oh my God, do you have a crush on Speed Racer? Or do you like Racer X? I knew a girl who was in love with Racer X. She was always trying to get me to watch the movie but I always got nauseas five minutes in."

"I watch for the race sequences. And I like the cars. They have cool gadgets."

"Good to know you have a type – guys with cool, gadgety cars," Skye teases, letting out a surprised squeak when May pinches her side. "I'll try to watch the movie again soon, see if I can get through it without getting motion sickness."

"Don't watch that piece of crap. I don't know what that was, but that was not Speed Racer."

She can feel May tying up her braid and prepares herself to be politely ordered to leave, but that order never comes. Instead, May reaches under a pillow and pulls out a laptop.

"I downloaded every episode ages ago," she explains. "Would you like to watch some with me now? Unless you're tired – "

"No!" Skye clears her throat. "I mean, no, I'm not tired. You really downloaded _every_ episode?"

May proudly nods her head. "All fifty-two." She moves to settle herself against a pillow, resting the laptop on her thighs and powering it on. Skye quickly follows.

Hours later Skye finds herself waking up in the dark next to a still sleeping May, the both of them covered by a heavy blanket she suspects bears a certain Avenger's image. It doesn't take long for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She can see that the laptop has been put away, although she's not entirely sure where, and she can make out May's face resting several inches from her own.

The last thing she remembers half-hearing a whispered conversation before being covered in something warm. Before that, she remembers resting her head on May's shoulder and watching Spritle and Chim-Chim climb into the Mach 5's trunk for the millionth time and how nice it felt when May briefly rested her head on top of hers instead of shrugging her off like she feared she would. That nice feeling, the good sort of ache that spreads through her chest when May or Coulson look at her with pride and affection, it's still there. There's also a heaviness in her limbs that isn't just sleep. She feels comfortable. More than that, she feels safe and warm, kind of content and maybe even kind of loved, and she never wants to move ever again. She can't remember the last time she felt this comfortable and she really doesn't want morning to come. Morning means moving, it also means facing May and whatever awkwardness her sleeping in the woman's bed might bring because, despite how much she wishes it, Melinda May is not her mother. She did not come from her, she came from another Chinese woman who got torn to pieces in a literal way rather than just figuratively and she is sure that sharing a bed with your S.O. breaks some sort of mentor/protégé boundary.

Skye closes her eyes and tries to will herself into getting up and out of May's bed and into her own across the hall, but she is just still so comfortable and even her head feels heavy now. All she wants to do is to stay, to scoot over a few inches and bury herself into May's side because she smells nice and feels like home in a way that nothing and no one has before. Sometimes it feels like there's a string tied around her heart and May holds the line in her hands, either gently pulling her closer or loosening her grip so that she falls further away. Sometimes she wonders who put that string there in the first place, if it was her own doing or May's or Coulson's, or if it's just a haphazardly placed piece of someone else's grand design. Either way, the connection is there and right now it is stretched and pulled taut.

She takes a deep breath and just when she manages to uncurl her legs Skye hears a soft, almost happy hum come from May's direction before a familiar calloused hand gently brushes her hair out of her face. She can feel May's eyes on her, watching her in the dark while she continues to slowly and gently stroke her hair, soothing some of the worry out of her mind and letting sleep sweep over her once again.

It's not awkward in the morning.

May wakes first, unceremoniously pulling the blanket off Skye and firmly stating "Gym in five minutes" before flicking the girl's left big toe and walking out. The rest of the day goes by quietly. Skye spends most of it, once again, working on her laptop, this time in the lab, and when she walks into her room at the end of it, she is very surprised to find a familiar ratty panda bear waiting for her on her bed with a note.

"She's yours now. – M"

Skye sits on her bed and reads the note over a dozen times, clutching Bo close and breathing in the lavender-jasmine scent she still carries. She thinks about that string around her heart and feels its gentle tug. She pictures herself charting May's words and sparse affections along its path and discovers it is knotted around both their fractured hearts.


End file.
